Iron Rage (20 page)

“Reckon you're right, Boggert,” Ryan said. “All right, everybody. Time to head back.”

“Have we really come two miles, sir?” Manda asked.

“Atcheson, you got our progress all caught up and everything?”

“If by ‘caught up' you mean I got a sort of squiggly line meandering across a sheet of otherwise blank paper like an earthworm that got dropped in a mug of Towse Lightning, sir, yes, sir.”

“Ace on the line. Then write ‘two miles' at the point you're at.”

“Yessir! Done, sir.”

“See how simple it was?” Ryan cast another uneasy look at the clouds. They were starting to pile up along the horizon and the sun was already closer to them than he cared for. “Time to get back to the blasterboat.”

* * *

“A
LMOST GOT IT
,” Myron called up from the beach.

Santee looked at Ricky down the four-foot length of truss and grinned. The youth wasn't sure how one of his group's smaller members had gotten paired with the biggest of the whole contingent. Not to mention the strongest.

But when it came to implementing J.B.'s scheme of turning the wrecked
Queen
into a makeshift ironclad herself, before the rads and heavy metal poisoning—and the crocs, and the stickies—chilled them all, everybody found him- or herself doing everything. Whatever happened to be needed while you were around, you did.

And that's leaving out the swampers, Ricky thought. We haven't seen any sign of them yet,
muchas gracias a Nuestra Señora
!

They'd been stuck there over two weeks now. Ricky was feeling a constant turmoil in his guts. He didn't care to mention it to anyone. He didn't know what was causing it—whether it was the effects of prolonged rad exposure, or the grinding tension of being slowly roasted by nukes while awaiting death at the suckered fingertips of the Deathlands' most feared muties, there wasn't a
nuking thing anyone could do about it. Except get their posteriors out of there.

“Right,” Myron said. “Ease her down.” He was acting mostly normal and not at all depressed these days. Apparently having hard and serious work—work that carried with it even the smallest glimmering of hope, which was about what this had—agreed with the bearded acting captain. Anyway, this was his idea—or obsession—fixing up his beloved boat and using it to get them out of there. What J.B. contributed was a sliver of a chance it might actually
work
.

“One,” the big Indian counted, nodding. “Two. Three.” And he and Ricky eased the truss down onto the railing.

Ricky cussed under his breath. He knew Our Lady could hear his unseemly language. That didn't mean his friends had to. He had gotten the rag he was using to protect his left hand from the rusty, cut-steel edge stuck between it and the wood. Now he had to winkle it out somehow. They didn't have any infinite supply of rags. Nor anything else—which was going to become a serious concern in not too many more days.

If we live that long, he thought. There were times Ricky felt almost tempted to hope something happened to get it all over with. Almost.

They had caught a true bit of luck in the form of the damage the mega-quakes had done the old-style railroad bridge. It had broken a lot of the structural steel—and some which struck Ricky as mostly ornamental, if not totally so—all to hell. So it was possible to look for sections that mostly fit the spots on the
Queen
's hull and superstructure that Myron, working
heads-together with Avery, J.B. and his assistant, Sean, picked for them.

But they did not miraculously all just fit exactly, which meant brutal work cutting and trimming. That meant using a hammer, a cold chisel and a file. It was possible, but it was slow, and it sucked the life out of a person like a bleeding wound.

They did their best to knock off the worst jaggedness on cut or broken edges with a file. But the constraints of their own endurance, and the fact that here and now time was almost literally blood and it was steadily draining out, imposed limits on how good a job they could do. Even Santee, whose palms and finger pads just seemed to be giant predark baseball gloves of calluses, had to use bits of folded-up cloth to protect himself.

Of course, they got cut anyway. Ricky's hands hurt all the time, both from the gashes and the exertion. He knew everybody else's did, too. And he had determined from the first moment fate had thrown him in with Ryan Cawdor and the rest that he would do what the others did, and never falter, never complain.

If it didn't work out quite that way for him…well, truthfully it didn't for anyone else, either. Even Ryan, even the stolid J.B., had been known to piss and moan every once in a while. A
great
while, granted.

He leaned on the rail for a moment to get after his breath. It had gotten away from him again. He suspected somebody would yell at him pretty directly about his bad habit of forgetting to breathe during intense moments of concentration combined with effort. He had
blacked out and keeled over more than once during the week they'd been at work repairing the
Queen
's breached hull, shoring up the half-gutted cabin, gathering and shaping bridge and railway iron, hauling it downstream and hefting it into place.

Behind him he heard Krysty muttering something under her breath as she and Doc lowered another, similar U-section length of red steel onto the analogous segment of the port bow, the one toward the center of the stream. There had been some spirited debate among the
Queen
's crew as to whether to try refloating her before adding a few tons more weight. Myron had decided it was better to leave her partially beached. That meant they wouldn't have to mess with trying to haul the improvised armor chunks onboard off a boat. Or a raft, really—the motor launch was occupied pretty much full-time hauling crews upstream to gather scrap, and then towing the loaded rafts back. They had cobbled their small flotilla of five rafts into two bigger, stouter ones.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “All this and now it starts to rain.”

As if to confirm the old man's words, a drop struck the back of Ricky's right hand. He looked up. The clouds, which had been colluding in a threatening way overhead as the afternoon grew on, were now a solid dark mass overhead. And delivering on their earlier threat, as more drops struck his head.

Santee grinned.

“It rains on the just and the unjust alike,” he said.
“So somewhere, there are just people getting wet, too. They're the poor bastards we should be pitying.”

Everybody laughed. Ricky wasn't sure if it was even funny, but he laughed, too. Anything to ease the burden of the day.

Arliss had been dubious about leaving the tug grounded to armor her up. The weight of all that steel would make it harder to dig her out and refloat her. He wanted to do it once Avery had overseen the hull patch, which had taken no more than a day, since the
Queen
carried stores designed for just that purpose. But Myron held firm, and Nataly backed him. They didn't have a dry dock in which to armor his vessel, so he'd let the shore do the job.

Krysty, J.B. and the rest of the companions mostly stayed out of it. These were the people who knew boats and the river. The job was going to be tough whichever way they did it. Ricky was glad that he didn't have to help manhandle multiple hundred-pound lengths of rusty metal off a raft in the middle of Wolf Creek. The crocs had started coming around more often. The group had taken to occasionally throwing a shot their way, just to remind them what blasters were, which seemed to be working.

So far.

Nataly knelt over the piece of truss Ricky and Santee had just placed with a spool of 16-gauge fence wire and a pair of wire cutters. Just as they didn't have cutting torches to ease the work of shaping the scrap to fit, they lacked welding heads to fasten them together once they were in place. J.B. remembered, and Doc
confirmed from his own firsthand observation, that back in the nineteenth century the armor for the first ironclads, and the later hulls of full-metal ships, were bolted together. The
Queen
didn't carry in her stores or in her cargo bolts that were big enough to do the job.

But she did carry a few hundred-pound spools of that fencing wire, enough, or so they reckoned, to secure the pieces, using the bolt-holes in scavvied rails and the trusses that had them. Or they could simply wrap them in place when they lacked holes, as this chunk did.

They weren't building for the ages, J.B. pointed out. And as his apprentice in fact if not in name, Ricky knew what that cost him. The Armorer was a perfectionist. But, like all things, only when he could afford to be. In this case, he observed, all the so-called armor needed to do was hold together long enough to let them run a fleet of hostile big-blaster ships. Specifically, to run the New Vickville fleet, since the run would be significantly faster downstream, and that was the one which lay that way.

It would be good enough, or it wouldn't, which described the way Ricky Morales had led his whole life after the coldheart raiders came and destroyed his village, his family and the life he had known for all his sixteen years.

“The launch is coming back,” Santee remarked, glancing upstream. It was raining briskly now. “Last run of the day, I reckon.”

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed again, this time much louder and with considerably more emphasis.
Ricky turned to look at him. It was his favorite exclamation, but usually he didn't give vent to it more than once a day if that.

But the old man was standing upright, pointing a long arm.

“Stickies!” Doc hollered. “A veritable horde of them!”

To Mildred's horror the cleared space of shoreline around the
Queen
's bow was instantly thronged with stickies. The rain wasn't coming down hard enough to shield the awful scene from view.

“Cut the towline!” J.B. immediately snapped to Arliss, who was steering the motor launch. Abner was on the scavvy party, too. But as with every job they'd been doing since they got started on this insane project, that was rotated as much as possible. They didn't want anyone getting burned-out. Or no quicker than utterly necessary.

“But the crap—” Arliss began.

“Gotta move,” J.B. declared. “The raft will float downstream.”

“What if it hits the boat?” Jake asked.

“You want there to be a boat to get to? No time!”

The navigator looked ready to argue more, but Arliss drew a sheath knife and slashed the towline with no further argument.

It wasn't hard to see why. Myron and Sean were already almost surrounded by loathsome, pale rubbery bodies.

The outboard motor's grinding churn rose to a snarl.
The bow lifted up on a V-shaped wave the craft leaped forward at the best speed it could muster with eight bodies on board.

But will it be in time? Mildred thought, drawing her ZKR 551 blaster. Will anyone be left?

Aiming with both hands she began to fire. At this range and speed, in a bucking boat, she had no chance of nailing a specific target. But she was aiming inshore of where the acting captain and his assistant mechanic were fighting for their lives. She had a reasonable chance of missing them—and an equally reasonable chance of one of her soft lead 158-grain slugs finding a home in stickie flesh.

And if she accidentally hit and chilled one of the two men—would that be a bad thing? Or an act of mercy?

* * *

K
RYSTY DREW HER
Glock handblaster. Inconvenient as it could be, with holsters and protruding butts wanting to snag the heavy pieces of scrap metal, all of the companions had their weapons near to hand at all times.

Of the
Queen
's complement only Nataly wore a sidearm, but the others made sure to keep a weapon nearby.

On board the ship, Myron and Sean had been caught unarmed onshore.

Krysty thumbed the Glock to full-auto fire. Now was not the time for concerns about safety. She aimed it down into the mass of bodies converging on Myron from her left and fired a quick burst.

The blaster climbed, but her 9 mm copper-jacketed slugs sent a couple of stickies sprawling onto the ground.
Others tripped and fell across them, their hoots rising to a crescendo of frustrated fury.

She heard Ricky's Webley handblaster cut loose to her right. From the corner of her eye she saw Santee swing a big leg over the rail, looking to climb down to rescue his friends.

“Stay back, you big stupe!” Myron cried, his face red behind his beard. A stickie grabbed him from behind. It missed its grip, but its suckered fingers yanked the man's gray plaid shirt back. It pulled itself against him, groping for his face with its free hand. He jabbed an elbow back into its face, and the mutie fell back.

Krysty fired again, staring at a point just over Myron's right shoulder. When recoil made her blaster rise slightly, bullets continued to rake the stickies thronging behind the ones closing in to swarm the captain. Yellow blood flew up in horrific counterpoint to the rain.

Myron flung himself forward desperately. Krysty flicked the selector switch to single shot, leaned over the rail, reaching out with her left arm while she continued to snap single head shots into the mutie mob. With a roar and a gout of flame from her blaster, Nataly pushed up beside her, likewise stretching a hand toward the captain.

Myron flung his hands out and took immediate hold of both. The two women began to haul him upward with all their strength, as he scrabbled with his boots against the hull to get purchase.

Krysty was almost yanked over the rail when a stickie, scrambling up the backs of its mates, landed
on Myron's back. Then a slim length of steel punctured the creature's eye. The blade was withdrawn with a revolting sucking sound. The mutie's corpse fell back.

Stickies came in a bewildering variety of appearances. Some lacked any trace of a mouth. This breed had them, filled with curving black needle teeth.